March 2019

In this issue

Every so often, Steve Easterbrook’s roosters, who act as sentinels for his thousands of brown hens, mistake a plane descending into nearby Vancouver International Airport for a predatory hawk or eagle.
The warning squawks send the hens scurrying back into the barn, their dainty clawed feet clicking like rain on the hard ground. Once the perceived danger is past, the chickens...

Fake news may or may not be a thing, but interest in the authenticity of brands, products and experiences shows no signs of cooling. Expedia Group’s 2016 Millennial Traveller Report found that experiencing authentic culture was most important to 76 percent of baby boomers, 62 percent of gen-Xers and 52 percent of millennials. And its Multinational Travel Trends, published last...

In my Vancouver office you’ll find a 2007 iMac, a couple of guitars, an impressive dustball collection and one gram of high-potency marijuana (total THC: 18.5 percent), purchased online through BC Cannabis Stores. The process—once called scoring, if I’m not mistaken—was surprisingly efficient, and had the added advantage of not involving a bus trip to East Hastings Street to meet...

Jennifer Waldern is going places. On a brisk December day, the seagulls on Vancouver’s Granville Island squawk around her as she soaks in some last sights of the city. Next week the 2013 UBC computer science graduate is moving to a new job at Microsoft Corp.’s main campus in Redmond, Washington. There, Waldern will take a hybrid role as a...

When the U.S. government bailed out Citigroup in late 2008, Manica Gautam was working in its London office as an associate with the global consumer and retail investment banking division. “I was probably fortunate to be cheap enough not to lay off,” the casually dressed Gautam jokes at the smart downtown Vancouver headquarters of JH Investments, the private holding and...

Growing up in Lavington, a small community near Vernon in the North Okanagan, Lana Kirk was good at math and science, so she expected to study science in university. But when she headed to SFU on a $20,000 entrance scholarship in 1995, fresh out of high school, she changed her mind.
“I was like, I don’t know what I’m going to...

It was the early 1980s, and Brenda Leong was conflicted. A couple of years after graduating with a business degree from the University of Alberta, the native Calgarian had a job as a customer service representative at Bank of Nova Scotia. She enjoyed the field and had inherited her serial entrepreneur father, Carl’s, love of capital markets, but something didn’t...

Kathy Butler has worked in investment banking at CIBC for 22 years. That’s highly unusual, she notes, explaining that she stays for the reasons that attracted her in the first place. After an investment banking presentation at U of T’s Rotman School of Management, where she got her MBA (finance with honours) in 1996, Butler thought, “That is absolutely what...

Natalie Cartwright, who has two master’s degrees and has lived in eight countries, comes from a family that prizes education. Although she’s never owned a car, her parents have given her pair of jumper cables as a graduation gift, she says, to remind her to think of education in a similar way: “It’s something that you carry with you and...

Anne Giardini’s foray into the world of economics is of another time. In 1977, as a first-year student at the University of Ottawa in her hometown, she took the subject on the advice of the woman at the admissions desk. “She asked me a few questions about my interests and suggested that economics would be something I’d enjoy,” Giardini recalls.
It...